Peter Tinè ASC-128

Dr. C. Perring Winter 2001

TISSUE Engineering &lab grown organs

The main points of my presentation were to discuss what tissue engineering is and how organs are being grown in the lab. I really wanted my classmates to understand why it’s so important that scientists work on engineering tissue and growing organs in the lab. We are faced with a great shortage of organs, hearts being number. Unfortunately they are the most complicated organ to engineer. Heart disease is the number one cause of death so it would be highly beneficial for tissue engineers to make a breakthrough and figure out how to grow or repair these organs.

There is also a demand for other organs, but scientists believe that when they figure out how to engineer a heart that the other organs will be simple in comparison to engineer. Skin has been commercially grown for over ten years now. Fortunately skin is easy to grow and engineers have mastered effective ways to grow it. Unfortunately other human organs are not as easy to engineer and scientists say that they are still in the stage of infancy of figuring out how to grow a human heart.

Tissue engineering is the development and manipulation of laboratory-grown molecules, cells, tissues, or organs to replace or support the function of defective or injured body parts. Scientists have mastered growing cells outside the body for many years. But as I explained above, getting entire organs to grow in the lab is a challenge that they are faced with. The possibility of growing complex tissue to replace the function of human tissue is a recent development. Because engineering is such a complex project, it takes not only scientists but also a much larger team of experts. Other than cell and molecular biologists, biomaterial engineers, computer-assisted designers, robotic engineers, and developers of high technical equipment are needed in order to move forward in this complicated project.

Researchers are working on growing basically every organ you can think of. Many different techniques are being used in tissue engineering. There are three types of techniques they are experimenting with. They range from growing organs outside the body to injecting patients with molecules that will induce the patients own cells to regenerate the organ on its own. Researchers have also been fooling with techniques that are capable of growing what are called neo-organs. Neo-organs are grown around a biodegradable polymer net to take the shape of the original.

There are many pros of tissue engineering that in my opinion far out way any cons that some individuals may point out. Over 50% percent of patient’s bodies reject the transplanted organ within five years of the operation. That is a major problem that scientists and doctors have been faced with for years. When a transplanted organ is placed into someone's body, the person who receives the transplant is at a great risk. Their body will see the new organ as a foreign invader and will do everything it can to attack and kill the organ until it can no longer function. To help this problem patients are put on a drug therapy program and have to take immunosuppression drugs. Though this drug helps the patient’s body to accept the new organ it puts the patient at a risk because their immune system is weak and not able to fight off diseases such as cancer.

Some countries say that they expect to be growing organs in partial fetuses to harvest for transplant within the next decade. What scientists are doing now is studying other animals and fetuses to try and figure out exactly what the best ways are for them to try and engineer the organs they are trying to grow. Researchers are now looking at flatworms because of their amazing ability to re-grow or regenerate damaged tissue. Also they are looking at fetuses to try and figure out how cells differentiate to grow into specific organs. An alternative to growing organs in the lab is something called xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation is using animal organs for human transplants. New techniques are being devised to grow human organs in animals such as pigs, for transplant. The creation of tissue for medical use is already a fact to a limited extent. Making whole organs seems a lot less than far fetched!

Once I began to research my topic I discovered that it was not going to be so easy. Because most of these techniques are still under development, I was not able to find any kind of books on the topic. I had to resort mostly to the Internet and the few journal articles that I was able to find. There were not many biotech companies online that offered much information. Do to the limited amount of information out there, I was not able to give many examples of specific cases. So from the start I knew that I was not going to have much to offer except to tell what tissue engineering was about, and who is involved init. With the background that I have in biology I probably could have got the class more involved in asking me questions that I would have been able to answer. Such as how cells divide and work together as a tissue or an organ.

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I thought that most people were fair when they filled out the evaluation sheets on me. These sheets can be very helpful; most people pointed out the same areas in which they thought I needed to improve upon. Most everyone said that I did not ask enough question and get any kind of conversation going. I strongly agree that I should have done so. I may have been able to make some interesting conversations because of my knowledge in biology and genetics. I do agree with the fact that I did not mention many cases, but there were not many that I was able to find because it is such a new topic. There were only a few cases that I found and I did mention them. Handouts were another area that I was lacking in. Something interesting that I might have been able to do was bring in some plastic models. Possibly of skin and a heart or other organs to show how these tissues differ and show why we are capable of growing skin but not other organs. Overall I feel the presentation went well but if I would have incorporated some of these other methods it may have been an excellent job.

HELPFUL WEBSITES :

Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative (PTEI)

http://www.pittsburgh-tissue.net/research/index.html

Growing Human Hearts

http:www.geocites.com/chef_17_zs/growing_human_hearts.html

Tissue Engineering

http://www.geocities.com/chef_17_zs/tissue_engineering.htm

CNEWS; Monday, October 20, 1997, Expert predicts human fetuses will be grown to harvest organs in 10 years

http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSScienceArchive/oct20_frog.html

Scientific American; Growing New Organs by David J. Mooney and Antonios G. Mikos

http://www.sciam.com/1999/0499issue/0499mooney.html